I've been involved in the arts and media in New York since the 1970s as both a participant and observer, trying to keep pace as the city continually renews itself. Recently I completed work on a musical about the Internet called "Cyberia: A Musical Dot Comedy."

The idea of “spin” in the public discourse originally had to do with the spin cycle on a washing machine—describing the process of coaxing target audiences to see some shapeless blob of truth in a different light, so a pile of wet laundry becomes a fancy wardrobe.

Lance Armstrong,(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

For cases like those of the athletes Manti Te’o, Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong perhaps we should create a back etymology for the concept—spin as in spinning a yarn or, in the popular parlance, creating a “backstory.” These athletes and those who surround them have spun some doozies for us, tall tales in the great American tradition of folk-hero mythologizing. Now we watch awestruck as the beautiful myths they’ve spun come entirely unraveled—with the unraveling, too, becoming part of the story.

Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker, along with his enabling friends and teammates, apparently thought having a winsome-looking, ethnically appropriate girlfriend who dies tragically would enhance the glory he achieved on the gridiron. Te’o may have honestly thought his fabricated online-only girlfriend was real, but there was no requirement that he share her existence/nonexistence and demise/nondemise with his fans and the media except for the idea that the more colorful the backstory, the better. (I’m sure the purveyors of the tragic girlfriend saga had no idea they were replaying a novel and film that captured America’s heart some four decades ago—Love Story, about a star college hockey player whose inamorata dies. The author was an expert in classical Greek tragedy.)

For Tiger Woods the “spin” was more directly related to monetary remuneration via commercials and endorsements, but he willingly played along with the idea that he was an upstanding family guy and all-around straight-arrow, when in fact he was a compulsive philanderer. This was hardly new—“handlers” had athletes like Babe Ruth visiting dying children in hospital rooms even though off-camera and off-field, according to a recent biography, Ruth was a something of a Bacchanalian near sexual predator. What I find sad about Woods is that if he hadn’t gone along with, and cashed in on, the phony backstory, I don’t think anyone could have faulted him for what he did in his personal life, i.e., acting like a run-of-the-mill rock star or matinee idol.

Woods’ transgressions were mild compared with Lance Armstrong’s. Armstrong, as we all know, spun a backstory almost too good to believe, that of overcoming cancer, before he went on to reign supreme in an heretofore exotic sport, cross-country bicycling. With the perfect name, evoking those all-American Armstrongs Jack, Neil and Louis, his was an ideal saga for our media age. His backstory about cancer was absolutely true—but his front story, that he succeeded because of natural championship-level athletic prowess, was, he now admits, a lie.

Now in his TV interview with Oprah Winfrey he seems intent on spinning a new backstory, including the idea that he took performance-enhancing hormones like testosterone because his testicular cancer required him to. Additionally, he claims that to compete at all in the sport, he was forced to dope, since so many in the sport already did it when he arrived. It’s not clear that his new backstory will buy back even an iota of the favorable image of him once held by the public.

Tiger Woods (Photo credit: cliff1066™)

The urge to feed the public with a compelling personal history for our heroes may be age-old, but I believe the modern version of the prepackaged backstory got its start with Olympic telecasts where competitors, usually American, were fashioned mini-documentaries about their lives back home to be broadcast just prior to an event. I think it worked—it did make these events somehow more dramatically satisfying when we learned things about the participating characters, like how skier Pekabo Street got her unusual name.

But all this yarn-spinning has “spun” out of control. Even in nonathletic competitions there’s now a compulsion to provide backstories. It’s profoundly irritating when in a singing competition like TV’s American Idol we’re hit with mini-biographies of some who haven’t even made it past the first audition. More seriously, political candidates on both sides now lie egregiously in TV ads during election years, lobbing narratives about each other they know are mostly bunk. The nadir of spin as an operant theory has to have been when an aide to President George W. Bush derided journalists for being part of a “reality-based community” and not buying the b.s. constantly being shoveled out by that administration.

Acting students were once told that the most important thing in show business was sincerity, and if they could fake that, they could go anywhere. But it’s time to get over the idea that there’s a separate media-based reality superior to the real one; that there is a second kind of sincerity—“spincerity”—that works much better than honesty. And that one’s image, no matter how fake, is all that matters.

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I’m reminded of the “spincerity” of the televangelists’ public confessions, explaining away their vice by creating an addiction backstory and delivering it with fat, glistening tears.

The ultimate spincerity moment, I submit, was written long before the television broadcast coverage of the Olympics. In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” Mark Antony turns public opinion on its head after Caesar is assassinated. Below is an excerpt from the end of Antony’s famous “Friends, Romans, Countryman…” speech.

ANTONY Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up To such a sudden flood of mutiny. They that have done this deed are honourable: What private griefs they have, alas, I know not, That made them do it: they are wise and honourable, And will, no doubt, with reasons answer you. I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts: I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man, That love my friend; and that they know full well That gave me public leave to speak of him: For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, To stir men’s blood: I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know; Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor poor dumb mouths, And bid them speak for me: but were I Brutus, And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue In every wound of Caesar that should move The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.